Relying on a deprecated API, only available to Chrome, and forcing a slow polyfill on everyone else seems like a sure fire way to try to push people to use Chrome and make things slow for everyone else.
Whether or not this latest Edge / div debacle was malicious or not, the company has a history of doing stuff leaning that direction.
Wow, that's a rude standpoint to take. Of course a monopoly can implement technically better solutions more quickly but the author is completely disregarding the benefits of distributed power: That you as a consumer can decide what you need and what you will use and that you're not a big company's slave. Ignoring this is just short-sighted and an asshole move towards others, IMO.
Oh and also, EdgeHTML might not have been the best engine but saying it "sucks shit" is a bit extreme.
Sorry, I don't really get what's wrong with using Chromium in Edge. It is open source. Everybody can contribute or even fork the code (Blink/WebKit).
And I think Microsoft did a genius move because Edge can be now the cool browser that rocks like Chrome but without the privacy issues it offers.
This is also the problem Mozilla confronts. Year after year they urged for open source and an open web and now that Microsoft opts for it, they feel betrayed.
Put another way: the rendering engine is a commodity while the intention you use it for is the real deal.
Undoubtedly, Google controls what happens in the Chromium stack (Blink/V8). I gotta admit that I don't know if MSFT's actually using Blink or just WebKit, so idk how much power Google effectively has over that.
But either way, the platform is not really controlled by the community. Sure you can file issues and pull requests or even fork Chromium but ultimately, Google still controls what's merged into the global Chromium master, so it's not really decentralized power.
Also, you've missed the main point. The problem here isn't that we don't have enough free/open source browser engines, the problem is that we don't have enough _different_ browser engines. If there's only one dominant browser engine, then whoever maintains that engine can decide how the web works. And that's kinda scary.
Google controls but knowing Microsoft, they'll probably pull what Google did to Apple with WebKit.
My bet is that Microsoft will offer everything that google offers, AND some more extras that google probably won't want to offer to protect their business plan.
Also, my bet is that Microsoft will make kick-ass documentation for Chromium and kick-ass developer integration with the popular VSCode so web developers will reach for that first.
Author here. Diplomacy isn't my strong suit, and I don't care if you think me rude.
I'm not saying consumers shouldn't have choice. That isn't at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is: Chrome didn't arrive at its market share by some corporate scheme to enforce usage by vertical tying. Chrome arrived at that market share by making a great piece of software that most consumers like and are happy with.
And I take particular offense to a browser that is bundled with an operating system by default--as opposed to one a user has to go out of their way to download--as being some panacea to Google. Edge and Safari likely have meaningful market share for no reason beyond: they ship with Windows and macOS respectively.
Chrome certainly ships as the default on Chromebooks and Android, but you'd be remiss to ignore that Chrome is the most used browser on Windows, and second most common on macOS. Those are consumers making a choice. Yet so many people in programming and tech circles don't stop to ask themselves why consumers are opting for Chrome.
So maybe the final line in my post seems harsh, but here's the reality: Edge is only a thing because it ships with Windows. Beyond that I see no technical reason to favor it over Chrome or even Firefox. On Windows, consumers have already spoken: they like Chrome. Lastly, Edge is a pretty questionable argument in favor of "consumer choice", given it represents a choice no consumer actually made beyond "default browser in Windows."
IMHO, Chrome arrived at such a market share mostly through (i) ubiquitously ad campaigns (subways, buses, on the web, ...); (ii) an strong push towards the users (it's quite easy when your editor is in charge of what is basically the homepage of the internet for most people); (iii) an aggressive bundling strategy with dozens of other programs (JVM, freewares, ...).
While I share your disgust for IE and its successor Edge, you are incorrect about one thing.
The Chrome install base on Windows is not entirely due to user choice. Chrome is/was bundled and selected for installation by default with many other software products, including Adobe Reader, CCleaner, and Avast antivirus.
Fair counterargument. Thanks. I'd still contend it's different from something being bundled with an operating system (as in, a user or PC manufacturer must go out of their way to change it) and something that's tied to another piece of software that a consumer downloads.
My dads Dell came with Edge, Firefox and Chrome installed. I wonder how many other vendors are including multiple browsers? Surely if you purchase Win10 on its own you only get Edge, but I don't think most people are buying Win10 on its own compared to purchasing a PC that has it installed already.
all computers should do that.
and then have an icon called internet which spawns randomly either of the three (session based)
also you need a standard to share favicons.
I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but
I think this is a good case study of why some companies doesn't allow its employees to blog about their company or work without going through some sort of process.
No technical reason to use Edge over Chrome? Are being purposely ignorant? Edge has good pdf editing abilities - at least in the Surface line. When google can stop eating your ram and battery I'll consider it over Edge. Unfortunately MS is throwing in the towel.
Safari is also a good browser. I don't need justifications here.
I get what you're saying and I agree. If consumers want Chrome, they should be free to use it and what MSFT is doing with its pre-configured browser/search engine settings is approaching anti-competitive behaviour.
However, if everyone adapts a single solution (WebKit/V8) then the web will just gravitate towards that and neglect standards and other engines, making it harder for consumers to use those.
The quintessence here is: People shouldn't just look at the raw performace (or quality or whatever) of a product, they should also consider the implications of using it. If almost everyone's using one particular implementation of a standard, then the other implementations will be extinct and users of those other implementations will be forced to use that most prominent one, eliminating their choice.
You should care. Part of the implicit criticism in the original post by the intern is that Google is so arrogant in its browser’s dominance that it breaks the web and doesn’t give a shit if anyone complains about it. The tone of your article is certainly doing nothing to help that impression.
...except in this instance, they didn't break the web. That's what irks me about this attitude you hold, which I think is actually what's rude.
This notion that some intern posts an unfounded assertion that attributes malicious behavior to Google, that has multiple other plausible explanations? That is rude--attributing malice where it is wholly unjustified.
So am I remorseful for my tone? Fuck no. My truth standards are such that I'm not about to settle for other people's BS if there isn't evidence to support it. Speculation isn't evidence.
> Part of the implicit criticism in the original post by the intern is that Google is so arrogant in its browser’s dominance that it breaks the web and doesn’t give a shit if anyone complains about it. The tone of your article is certainly doing nothing to help that impression.
Is there anything that a person who doesn't work at Google (like the author) can do to help that impression? Is there any reason why anybody who doesn't work at Google should even worry about helping that impression?
If you look past the clearly frustrated tone, what he says makes sense.
It's much more likely that Google was trying to improve their user experience by working around an IE bug, than deliberately harming their user experience for a PR article.
Disappointed with people talking about the tone and not the content of the blogpost.
Didnt realize it was an intern (who probably lacks experience with the code) who made the false accusation in the first place. Even if that werent true, making baseless arguments do not sound like the new MSFT that HN tries to project.
The tone of the article and the posts in this thread are literally the most important piece of content.
This is the person who was directly called out for a specific action which broke one element of Edge functionality. His commits and comments have a very strong "well, fuck them" vibe to them.
I read the initial post that led to this blog reply. It accused google of not playing well with others. The engineer in question is in this thread saying he doesn't give a shit what people think about his tone and that he isn't diplomatic.
He is literally the criticism personified - the hubris made person.
Author here. I do not work for google. I mistakenly thought that obvious, but clearly it's been misunderstood.
And here's where I take umbrage with your response: I'm an engineer. I'm not here to sugar coat shit for people. There are a dozen different legitimate reasons someone may position some element over a video rendering window, and it is 100% MSFT's bad for not even considering this test case when they wrote their rendering engine.
And what really irks me is: thousands and thousands of people on the Internet seem to take this story by some MSFT intern as not only plausible but probable. And that's bullshit. Our standards for truth as engineers should be higher than that.
I'm a lawyer. I get paid a lot to communicate directly and precisely. While many people in our field are viewed as assholes, the best of us are able to be blunt while also being tactful. Being an engineer isn't an excuse for communicating poorly or having your tone override your message. Luckily this is a trait that can be worked on - I used to have the same issue and am getting better.
Let me take a deeper look at what's irking you: You state Google may have had a valid reason to do what it did. Okay. Let's conceed that. Despite that concession, does that actually address the problem you raised?
1) Google may have, despite having had a reason to do what it did, done it for the wrong reason. The timing of advertising which specifically required the negative effect of the change upon Edge's metrics certainly seems to point that way. You've described a plausible alterative rationale for their actions, but nothing more than that.
2) Incentivewise, Google has every desire in the world to maintain their browser marketshare numbers.
3) The full claim made by the intern is that this was one of an onslaught of changes made by Google to make their sites less performant on other browsers. Other people in the same thread indicated similar issues, and Google staff indicated that they were actually planning on resolving some of these issues in the future, an admission that the issues do, in fact, exist.
4) The intern further makes an allegation that the Edge team attempted to inform Google about the behavior, but did not receive any redress or explanation regarding the issue. One would expect that the Youtube team would have raised the issues you addressed regarding Edge's handling in a quick reply. They didn't.
Overall, if you were Google staff, your objection would deal with a number of these points I've raised, but as it stands that isn't the case.
I did appreciate the article's technical discussion, though, so thank you for that insight.
If my organization is called out, and the citation given is my specific work, I would consider that someone called me on my work, even if they hadn't named me.
He doesn't work for Google, nor did he implement the YouTube feature the intern called out. He implemented something similar in his own project. This was clear in the article.
That could be the case! But was it clear in the article? I just reread it and the author doesn't indicate where he works at all. He does, however, quote himself saying: "[...] I’m pretty sure I’ve written that exact code?"
Not 'related' or 'similar' code, mind you. Maybe that's where I assumed he was part of the team.
If you're right and he doesn't work for the company the piece becomes pure speculation.
Well Youtube performance used to suck under Firefox as well to the point that I felt that running youtube without the addon "Youtube Classic" in firefox was unbearable.
Playback or rendering ? I know my browser has performance issues because it doesn't have hardware-accelerated playback for VP9, I don't know if FF is in the same basket (sounds like it might be). Having an addon that only enables h264 solves that.
YouTube started using Shadow DOM V0 (which is deprecated) some time ago, which is implemented only in Chrome/Chromium, as a result all other browsers render it slower.
Not to mention pulling the Windows Phone Youtube app that Microsoft wrote because it wasnt made with html5. Nevermind that the android or iphone app didnt support it either.
What I would say, however is "rude" is attributing malice when there is a perfectly reasonable alternate explanation to a story.
That's really what I take umbrage with; our standards for truth should be higher than the insinuations of a MSFT intern with no clear evidence, and a total lack of the net community as a whole even to consider alternate possibilities.
For me, Edge is the only browser that behaves properly when a Youtube video is playing but is not in focus with hardware acceleration on (the exact scenario is I have a game on my main monitor with a Youtube video playing on my other monitor). Both Chrome and Firefox stop loading the video and show the spinning buffering symbol after a few minutes. All three browsers work fine with hardware acceleration off.
I am most frustrated not with Edge going to Blink, Not the tone of the article, but Web Technology as a whole.
I remember when I was doing Web programming in pre IE6 era, it was insanely frustrating. Pulling your hairs out trying to make the simplest thing to work across browsers. I didn't hate IE6 for Active X or its Standard forcing practice ( It is actually both good and bad ), but M$ unwilling to improve IE when there are lots of low hanging fruit, while actively stopping other browser from gaining ground.
Nearly 20 years passed, it still looks like a bloody mess. Yes it was a lot better than IE5 / 6 era, CSS still sucks, ( just less ), Cross browser handling of Keypress and Video still a mess? And we have now arrived to a point where Chrome/ Blink becomes a living reference implementation to test out ideas before it is "standardise". Web Pages that only works well in Chrome? ( I am not even talking about Web Apps which somehow 90% of the case we don't need but we still made it )
Seems Youtube has gotten slower for me over the years... Playing an HD video Firefox 55 (w/classic, MP4) uses 30%, Chrome 70 uses 20%, but Videolan uses a mere 4%!
It's puzzling why a modern browser uses far more CPU than a standalone app these days.
Let's not forget that Apple tried to force license-encumbered formats into web standards. If the publishers don't play along, any resulting poor experience is Apple's fault. Don't support bad actors.
> "Mozilla's Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube's Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome." https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/25/1128225/google-has-...
Relying on a deprecated API, only available to Chrome, and forcing a slow polyfill on everyone else seems like a sure fire way to try to push people to use Chrome and make things slow for everyone else.
Whether or not this latest Edge / div debacle was malicious or not, the company has a history of doing stuff leaning that direction.